Strong arms for 1,500-tonne loads

1,500 tonnes — or the equivalent of four Boeing 747s fully charged with passengers and fuel. That's what the recently installed Assembly Building bridge cranes will be capable of handling when operated together. In June, a powerful crawler crane was positioned outside of the Asse...

Jean-Louis Etienne, polar explorer, on energy and ITER

In 1986 Jean-Louis Etienne set out for the North Pole alone, on foot, from Ward Hunt Island in the extreme north of Canada—a voyage across the frozen Artic Ocean that lasted 63 days. Doctor, mountaineer, navigator ... Etienne has said that reaching the North Pole 'doesn't require...

60 years ago: the speech that changed everything

On 18 April 1956 a Soviet warship, escorted by two destroyers, pulled up to the dock in Portsmouth, UK. On board were two of the most powerful and enigmatic men of that time: Nikolai Bulganin, President of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and Nikita Khrushchev, Secretary of ...

First Plasma: 2025

To determine the precise date of ITER's First Plasma, hundreds of engineers, technicians and schedulers worked for nearly 18 months to reconcile the latest information from manufacturers in over twenty countries with construction progress on site. A number of variables were also ...

Mega contract to manage assembly and installation

The ITER Tokamak, with its one million components and ten times as many individual parts—is without a doubt the most complex machine ever designed. Whereas space rockets, interplanetary probes and nuclear submarines all rely on techologies that have been tried and tested by indus...